Page 807 - Great Gladiators

Author Notes:

Scripts tend to be written first, panels arranged second, screencaps grabbed third, and then panels and words edited and rearranged fourth until everything basically fits. I usually try to be conscious of page space in the scripting phase, but when I write overlong yet want to keep all the dialogue, that's what challenges me to do strange layouts to fit everything in. I honestly should do it more often.

In important news, I'm very happy to announce that the first monthly one-shot campaign, or SpudShot, was a success and is now publicly available for listening!

21 Comments:

I like the varied layout here. Work with the dialog, not fight against it. Good screen caps too.

Gilda's player reminds me of a type of player I've had now and then that enjoys rolling dice to smash things, but not big into the RP and Lore of the campaign. They're a more "crunch"-loving kind of player. Since I try an balance some combat and RP, usually they find their sweet spot in the party to get along. Usually.

These days, I go so far as to try to balance the player expectations before the campaign begins, and select players based in part on compatible expectations. (If you have one player who is "ALL SMASH ALL WARGAME NO SOCIAL RAR" and another who is "I'm here for roleplaying not rollplaying", you've got a problem before you even have a setting or RPG system selected.)

Wow, I like all of Gilda's expressions. Her larger size and ability to move her head like a bird leads to some interesting ones. I imagine that makes choosing screencaps for her dialogue easier - or more exciting.

Balance with the far more limited number of episodes she's in, and thus the far more limited number of screencaps. Though I wouldn't be surprised if FiM's creators consciously chose to do griffons this way for that reason, after their experience with the pilot.

Personally, I suspect it'll be more of a real life/time/commitment conflict thing, making her unable to keep coming, maybe with a dash* of, "Wow. Didn't know you had it in ya." or "Hm. This just isn't my style, but I'm glad you're enjoying - but I'll see you at our usual game at 6?" rather than a real, "I hate this game and what you're doing!" thing... but as I've not seen the episodes, I suppose I can't say for sure.

Ah, one of the biggest challenges of all for a DM. Campaign culture shock. Is it an investigation through the city's seedy underworld? A psychological horror exploration of a long abandoned orphanage? A hack and slash dungeon crawler? Maybe an epic quest to challenge a demigod for his crown? Then there's the RPG. Metaphysical and weird as all hell like Nobilis? Likely to have a high body count like most Cthulhu games? The granddaddy of them all with often a lot of grounding in 'mundane' (relatively speaking) matters and combat like D&D? All I can say is, you will find players who love at least one, and HATE another.

Tangent to the "Love one, hate the other" statement you made, I once had a local player who really enjoyed when I put magical talking ponies into the campaign. He even played in a one-shot Equestria adventure. However, he NEVER played as a pony. He kept to the classic D&D races (human, elves, etc.) although once I *almost* convinced him to play a Diamond Dog.

Huh. Usually when I'm doing it, screencaps are grabbed as part of writing scripts, since which screencap to use is part of the script.

Relying on the boxes helps with the layout since I don't need arrows pointing to the speakers, so I can put anyone's lines anywhere in the panel (so long as the result suggests the correct order of speech), though IMO the dialogue bubbles you have look better. I definitely broke out of the standard layout in two of the last arc due to dialogue layout concerns, but only a bit; maybe I can try more of that next time I put some comics together.

By chance, do you have any metrics or guides to help identify what's overlong dialogue while you're still in the scripting phase?

Well, something I discovered when I wrote my first guest comic that I ended up using as a rule of thumb for the next batch that I wrote is this: Dialogue that is longer than three sentences is probably going to end up too long on the panel.

Now this is completely dependent on what font size, format, and what kind/size of panel the dialogue is appearing in. It's a given that larger panels will be able to hold more dialogue written in a small font. But in order to avoid clutter and cut off long tangents before they start (unless that is what you are going for, in which case type like the wind!), I just make the cut off point at three sentences and adjust the dialogue accordingly.

Also, I know Spud talked a little bit more about his comic making process in his 4-year retrospective here. That may have more ideas on scripting that you can use in the future. I'll also just go ahead and apologise for my horribly nerdy voice while I'm at it. =P